I have a friend who is a good person overall but really buys into the "real life is becoming Idiocracy" bit. I was frustrated, because I'm not the best real-time arguer so I don't think I did a good job of expressing why the movie is disgusting trash.

I attempted to talk about how it blames people instead of systems, and how it's an awful eugenics narrative. But we quickly got into a rabbit hole about whether intelligence can be passed on genetically or not and if that matters, and other dumb topics that went nowhere.

What's a concise and offline-compatible way of explaining why Idiocracy is bad & decent people should find it gross?

  • Gay_Wrath [fae/faer]
    ·
    3 years ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

    The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores that were measured in many parts of the world over the 20th century

    Test score increases have been continuous and approximately linear from the earliest years of testing to the present

    so first of all, the premise literally has no scientific basis. The measurement known as IQ keeps keeps going up. So they essentially just made a movie to punch down.

    Secondly, as you might be able to guess from the fact that IQ is going up, IQ doesn't actually measure intelligence, it just measures some capabilities that we have labeled intelligence and what's actually going on is we're educating & caring for people better so they're better at useless brain tests. You can see this with physical athletes too. Look up any olympic sport all times records for something like the 10k meters and you'll see that the oldest record in the top 25 is from 1996, even though the event was added in 1912.

    Modern humans are just better.

    Secondly, the fucking classism in the movie. The characters behave like stereotypical trailor trash and enjoy everything you would associate with that trope. Being uneducated, messy, belching, toilet humor, drinking beer etc = tropes of the poor.

    The movie even takes it a step further with the paternalism by having the outcome be the smart person lead the poor for their own good. In the movie this is played for laughs, but this is literally a real argument that racists made for why they needed to subjugate black people into slavery or sterilize disabled people. For their own good and especially for "society's" own good.

    So they paint this as a farce but this is actually what racists think about people of color unironically and it supports the idea that 'dumb' people will outbreed the good people and we should step in to save them from their fate.